Food Security Policy

Lord Giddens Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Giddens]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for initiating this debate on a manifestly important topic. I speak as a member of the aforementioned Sub-Committee D. I know that other members are here, too; they all seem to be clustered on the other side for some reason. As the noble Baroness mentioned, food security has zoomed up the global agenda in recent years, and rightly so. A range of reports have been referred to, a number of them from the UN. There is the Royal Society report, Reaping the Benefits, and the Government’s Foresight report, which is one of the best to be produced on this issue recently.

As the reports do, I want to discuss the issue on a global level. Noble Lords will forgive my being slightly didactic by sketching the backdrop to the world as I see it today. The industrial civilisation in which we live is spreading across the world. It is the first truly global civilisation in history and is far more advanced than any other civilisation has been. It is discontinuous with previous civilisations. Looking at the history of civilisations, one observes that they tend to go down a little and then gradually up. Around 1850, civilisation starts to rise steeply. I suggest that we have essentially created a new world, with which we do not have experience of dealing by looking at history. This is one reason why it is so hard to cope with the risks that we have created. Essentially, we face what I call “new-style risks”, associated with the globalisation of industrial civilisation.

New-style risks are not like old-style risks, which can be covered by insurance companies. I can unfortunately tell you your chances of being involved in an accident every time you get into a car, because there is a long series of events on which to base them. With new-style risks, which are about present trends accelerating into the future, you cannot use that kind of risk calculation. That is one of the reasons why we tend to be in denial about those risks. We are in a civilisation in which the risks that we have created for ourselves—these are all humanly created risks—are rising steeply, but we are not in a world that is getting close to managing their consequences, or even to accepting their seriousness.

Climate change is the granddaddy of all these things. Imagine it: we are on the verge of radically and irretrievably changing the world’s climate. There is no way of getting greenhouses gases out of the atmosphere once they are there and they will be there for centuries. What are we doing? Virtually nothing. Anyone who saw the IEA report that came out today will see that the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere is still increasing, not decreasing, and it is increasing by more every 10 years than it did in the years before.

Three of the biggest new-style risks are climate change, population growth and world urbanisation. We have no experience of any of these. In 1850 there were still fewer than a billion people in the world. It is not that long ago in historical terms. We are now almost certainly coming up to there being 9 billion people not that far into the future. This is likely to happen, and some people think that there could be as many as 11 billion. This is an extraordinary transformation in the history of the world; it is totally different from anything that we have had to deal with before.

In the case of food security, each of those three risks—climate change, population growth and urbanisation—overlap. Sir John Beddington, who was referred to earlier, spoke of a perfect storm affecting the future of world society. He said that from a 2010 baseline we would need to create 40% more food, 30% more water and 50% more energy by 2050. Failure to generate these could produce massive conflicts over diminishing resources. To me, the world is like that old joke. A guy jumps off a skyscraper—in the City of London, let us say—and, as he falls, people on every floor hear him say, “So far so good, so far so good”. That is about our approach to the risks that we face globally. We have to get on with it. We have to make far more of a dent in these risks than we have so far.

How can the UK contribute? In my view, it can contribute in four ways. First, the Government should support research, including blue-sky research, around the edges of nanotechnology, for example, and other areas that directly affect food production. We have to increase productivity of crops and their resilience in the face of climate change, as the Foresight report noted. Brazil has made amazing strides in these respects and we should learn from best practice around the world.

Secondly, as was said by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, any solution must involve biotechnology, which I take to stretch quite a long way beyond GM crops, as well as conventional breeding techniques. Sir David King, another former Government Chief Scientific Adviser, got himself into trouble when he declared that food insecurity in Africa was partly the result of anti-GM campaigns. Obviously, there is a balance of risk. The risk of not feeding the world’s population is much larger, I think, than the risks involved in biotechnology.

Thirdly, we must counter changes in diet that are going on across the world and transforming our world dietary habits. It is weird to live in a world where 1 billion people go hungry and 1 billion people are obese or radically overweight. To me, the fast food corporations do not pick up the consequences of their advertising campaigns. They have to be picked up by publicly funded health services.

Finally, and fourthly, we must get to grips with food waste. It is estimated that some 40 per cent of food in the UK is wasted, if you include supermarkets, shops and restaurants. That is absurd in a world struggling to feed itself. I would welcome the Minister’s comments on any of these points.